DailyMotion (and tons of others) is one but really it was a timing thing, YouTube hit at the right time regarding media and another technological advancement at the time, flash video.

Before Flash video, before html5 video, video was very difficult on the web to make work, the small yet pretty good codecs that the flash player video had were revolutionary at the time (Back in Macromedia days). Flash compression was always one of the best even though it was mostly software, still swf files are compressed/streamed in a very compact way.

Those specifically timed events won't happen again the same way, Youtube was born at the cusp of social media and the technology that made video economical enough. Youtube wouldn't be known as it is without that Flash video moment in history.

Vimeo is not a Youtube alternative. Vimeo is to Youtube what Hacker News is to reddit. Vimeo is a nice video platform for creative projects, they do not allow a large amount of the content that Youtube does (no gaming videos, no dumb cat videos) and so it's not really suitable to replace Youtube.

There are other alternatives though, dailymotion.com is fairly popular and will accept anything.

I'm not sure you can have both high quality content and a zero barrier to entry. I actually think YT does an okay job surfacing some decent content for folks on the homepage, especially when you're logged in. I seem to anecdotally find the "related" sidebar more useful in recent times as well.

Vimeo is terrible, very anti gamer, to.the point they ban developers that put trailer videos on their service. I am personally very happy that YouTube now match Vimeo quality and happily hosts my trailers for me.

According to Vimeo's guidelines, you just can't upload gameplay videos. It says specifically you can upload first party videos but need to mark them to avoid deletion. With the huge community of video gamers on YouTube, I don't even get why you'd want to put that video on Vimeo.

Yeah you are right on about that. I always wondered why they aren't more friendly to their own content for nonusers because they're very friendly to discovery when you're logged in.

I think it doesn't get used as much though because they will pull content if you're just posting videos of your friend doing cartwheels or something. There is a higher barrier to entry but they also only want very high quality HD or serious commercial or educational content.

I wonder whether they aren't more forward about discovery to save on bandwidth money.

Really? In my opinion the Vimeo Android app is abysmal. The design isn't responsive at all, it looks third party and unprofessional. To be fair, it's much better on iOS - but still outclassed by YouTube.

Someone has. They're called the content creators. For some reason Youtube has gone to war with the people who make it a good place to go, people who've worked for years building their channel's reputation, content and style. Now youtube are systematically pulling it all down, real name coment issue aside.